Recently I came across the Detective’s Oath, written by
Dorothy Sayers and first administered by G.K. Chesterton, as part of the
initiation ceremony for the London Detection Club. The club, convened in 1930,
included the likes of Sayers, Agatha Christie, and a slew of other Golden Age
mystery writers.
The oath was this: “Do you promise that
your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using
those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance
on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo,
Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?”
While I think we’ve all seen
authors—well-known ones at that—break these principles regularly (after all,
why can’t a ghost solve a crime? Or for that matter, a cat?), there was
something to these expectations that made sense. A reader should be able to
work out whodunit, at least after the fact, to be fair.
But when I first read the oath, I had
to laugh. All three of us—Nancy Bilyeau,
Sam Thomas, and myself—have situated our mysteries in early modern England, a
time when divine revelation, providence, acts of God (or the Devil, for that
matter) often served as the explanation for most mishaps and misfortune. It would have been so easy—and realistic—to
have our sleuths solve crimes in that fashion.
After all, there are many incidences of
a community “solving” a murder when a corpse’s finger pointed to its murderer.
Or when the corpse’s eyes would open and stare in the direction of the
murderer’s house. There are even
examples of corpses bleeding from the nose or ears, indicating that their
murderers were in the vicinity.
Sometimes, logic and reason and
evidence would prevail and sometimes…they did not. There are many examples of
superstitions, hearsay, and feelings making their way into court testimony,
especially in ecclesiastical courts.
I can’t speak for Nancy and Sam’s
protagonists, of course, but I wanted Lucy Campion, my chambermaid in a A Murder at Rosamund's Gate, to be
someone who was resourceful and intelligent, despite having little formal
education. But it wasn’t just about creating a character who would use her wits
and evidence to solve a crime; I wanted her to question how the community
identified murderers in the first place.
I also wanted Lucy to be someone who
rejects the notion of providence as a means to explain murder. I wanted her to
dismiss the idea that divine revelation could be a reliable way to identify a
murderer—even if that meant challenging the expectations of her community.
I’d like to think that Lucy would
approve of the Detective’s Oath, even if everyone around her was convinced that the murderer could be discovered by a corpse's pointing finger.
But what do you think? If you're a writer, do you adhere to this oath? Or gleefully stomp all over it? If you're a reader, do you mind if the detective doesn't use logic or wits to solve a crime?
